71–80 of 123 posts
It's weird to see the term "App" in relation to anything before iOS era. Back then such software used to be mostly called applications or just programs. [1] [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=app%2Ccomputer...
I find it weird how generations need to change words. I guess Startup was new, and unconventional? For a few seconds they were? Then they got real slick with MBA’s?
It just changed everything, people stopped create desktop apps and started to create web apps. However, web as a platform was really weak for complex apps, so only now we see how companies re-discover lost apps from 80s and re-create them in the web (Notion, Coda, Airtable, Fibery)
https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...
That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying slightly improved versions of newsgroups (facebook), IRC (slack/discord), BBS (google)... I can't think of a new mode of communication invented in the last decades. One could say video, but live TV existed before. Scaling up is incremental. Right here, HN is barely different than newsgroups. If change had been non-incremental , we d be dismissing HN as something that only crazy people do (the equivalent of riding a horse to work)
It's weird to see the term "App" in relation to anything before iOS era. Back then such software used to be mostly called applications or just programs. [1] [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=app%2Ccomputer...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why use a μEmacs when you can use actual Emacs, with its comprehensive scriptability? μEmacsen made sense on older platforms like CP/M and MS-DOG, but they're pointless today.
I use mg because it's super fast
It's weird to see the term "App" in relation to anything before iOS era. Back then such software used to be mostly called applications or just programs. [1] [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=app%2Ccomputer...
It’s weird. They were called programs. Startups were called businesses. I find it weird how generations need to change words. I guess Startup was new, and unconventional? For a few seconds they were? Then they got real slick with MBA’s?
For me it is a lot about changing expectations. I used to use ecco pro for my notetaking. I loved it, it was very powerful and focused and it let me capture my ideas very effectively. Today I use onenote, which as an outliner sort of sucks. Why did I move from ecco pro to onenote? Because I want something that automatically syncs to all my devices, easily searches across a decade of notes and lets me get things done…
> This for me is the key: we expect tools to live on the network. All those apps of old, they were based around files I agree and it's why I'm a fan of apps that sync data via something like Dropbox or Google Drive. The application can still be file based and the developer doesn't have to run servers. There are the obvious limitations, but for personal use it works pretty well.
I have to mention Joplin here, which became my note-taking app after a lot of research. There are certainly more powerful apps, but Joplin is open source, runs on all devices, (Windows, Linux, Android and iOS in my case), syncs data via Nextcloud or Dropbox, and supports E2E-encryption. It also allows inserting images directly into the notes, which I found cumbersome with other markdown-based note apps.
The developer is also very active and adds useful features and bugfixes very regularly. Definitely worth the few bucks I donate every month.
> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there. That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying sli…
Okay but, could anyone broadcast on TV? Could anyone have their own TV channel?
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch... preceded by JustinTV, Vine, Periscope.
It's a different ballgame. There's whole new revenue streams, individual content creators are collectively making a ton of money . Consumers are directly (or nearly directly) compensating creators in many cases (e.g. Twitch) unlike before.
People who weren't alive at the time may not appreciate how different the commercial app ecosystem was: how many more options, how much less concentrated. Here is a PC Magazine cover from 1988: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-02-29 . It boasts a review of 55 different word processors. All of them would have been commercial; none of it was free, let alone open-source. It wasn't just word processors. Here is a…
If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use you'll find more than 55 tools. Word processors belong to an era where the computer replaced the typewriter and it's not needed any more these days. You can find commercial, free or open source note taking apps that are local or cloud based and offer a huge variety of features.
Are they really equivalent though? A word processor - with multi-page documents, pagination, rich formatting and layout, footnotes, headers, footers, ToC (table of contents) and so much more - seems a magnitude greater than simply a note-taking app.
I can understand why many developers might tackle a simple note app (or a simple blog generator, or static site generator). But a word processor feels like a much more complex beast.